Contains adult themes

Craig Munro

SO SECRETIVE was Australian literary surveillance that a list of banned books was not made public until 1958. Some novels, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, were banned for decades while others, including Brave New World by D.H. Lawrence's friend Aldous Huxley, were restricted for just a few years.

James Joyce's sexually explicit Ulysses (1922) was not formally banned in Australia until 1929, then released in 1937 only to be restricted again in 1941 after pressure from church groups. Defending this about-turn, the minister for customs declared the novel ''holds up to ridicule the Creator and the Church'' and ''cannot be tolerated any longer''.

By 1970, attitudes had changed once more, with customs minister Don Chipp declaring in Parliament that the concept of censorship was ''abhorrent''. It was also embarrassing and Portnoy's Complaint became the last work of fiction to face court in Australia. With the advent of Whitlam's reformist government two years later, the list of banned literary titles was reduced to zero.

Intrigued by rumours of a censor's library, literary historian Nicole Moore went searching for the old customs archive of banned books. In 2005, she tracked down the collection seven storeys underground in a huge repository in western Sydney. Thousands of banned books, all neatly covered and catalogued, filled 793 boxes. As Moore shows, such secret collections have accumulated in many parts of the world, often carefully tended by censor-librarians. Private Case, Public Scandal, the book that revealed the contents of the British Library's secret collection, was itself banned in Australia in 1966. Not surprisingly, the 20th century's largest and most notorious repository of forbidden literature was in the Soviet Union, with more than 1 million items.

Having uncovered this long-buried Australian archive, Moore set about the daunting task of charting its history. She was aided by Peter Coleman's pioneering work, Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition, first published 50 years ago. The Censor's Library is a much more substantial work, analysing in forensic detail the major controversies and teasing out the narrative of how such restrictions, and the ensuing protests, shaped Australia's cultural, intellectual and literary landscape.

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Moore's detective work brings to light a host of previously unknown prohibitions and exposes the motivations and mechanisms of censorship. As David Marr wittily observed, the censor's handiwork provides ''an index of Australia's innocence''.

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In Moore's words, the history of Australian literary censorship ''is one of courtroom dramas and internecine bureaucracy, stolen libraries and police raids, authorial scandals and moral panics, famous court cases and secret lobbying … suitcase searches and prison terms, hoaxes and conspiracy''.

This steamy underworld of writer heroes and censor philistines packs enough raw material for a score of novels, so compressing it into a single work of scholarly history appears absurdly ambitious. Yet apart from occasional lapses into obfuscation and chapters chock-full of sometimes disjointed episodes, The Censor's Library tackles a complex subject with admirable scholarly panache. Numerous colour illustrations are a bonus.

Arranged thematically rather than chronologically and peppered with subheadings, Moore's lively history will undoubtedly become the definitive reference. Website-like, this exhaustively researched book invites non-linear navigation, repaying whimsical interest as well as serious study, aided by an excellent index.

Her account covers everything from lurid comics and pulp fiction to the highbrow, from books riddled with sex and sedition to The Little Red School Book and The Peaceful Pill euthanasia handbook. Repression started early, with the first successful federal prosecution launched in 1901 against Melbourne bookseller George Robertson for importing French fiction, including stories by Balzac.

Australian publications, not subject to customs, were controlled instead by police vice squads and postal regulation. State obscenity laws generated the most sensational cases. In 1946, Lawson Glassop's Tobruk novel We Were the Rats was the first time an Australian publisher faced court for obscenity, while in 1948 Love Me Sailor author Robert Close was controversially jailed for obscene libel.

Detective work brings to light a host of previously unknown prohibitions.

Authors and publishers weren't the only ones caught up in the frenzy, with Gough Whitlam's copy of Another Country seized by customs in 1964. This James Baldwin novel was released the following year along with Nabokov's Lolita and the long-banned Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Earlier novels published overseas such as Jean Devanny's The Butcher Shop (banned in 1929) and Norman Lindsay's Redheap were kept out of their home market by customs. Christina Stead's Letty Fox, banned in 1947, was released a decade later with two of Devanny's novels, after a public outcry overturned the ban on J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Fears of a falling birth rate led to the restriction of birth-control information well into the 20th century. Gay and lesbian material took even longer to be accepted, with Gore Vidal's novel The City and the Pillar banned from 1950 until 1966. Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, banned for 21 years in Britain, found itself banned sight unseen in Australia.

During the most repressive decades there were no women on the Literature Censorship Board. With the 1945 banning of Kathleen Winsor's bodice-ripping Restoration romance Forever Amber, Australian censors lost faith in women readers - until then the ''reliable benchmark of prudence and respectability''. Next in the censor's sights was another bestseller, Peyton Place (banned 1957-71).

And whatever became of Philip Roth's runaway bestseller that so discomforted Democrat-in-the-making Don Chipp? When the masturbatorial Portnoy's Complaint was banned from importation in 1969, Penguin Australia printed 75,000 copies locally. Headline-grabbing court cases ensued in most states, with Patrick White appearing for the defence in Victoria and NSW. After two juries in Sydney failed to reach a verdict, Chipp finally overturned the ban in 1971.

The standard British test for obscenity as the tendency ''to deprave and corrupt'' had been established in 1868 by the aptly named Lord Cockburn. Deciding just what might be offensive, indecent, scandalous, disgusting or immoral has kept Australian politicians, lawyers, judges, juries, ''expert'' readers and legions of customs clerks busy ever since.

Later government ''classification'' regimes have mainly targeted violent porn and incitements to terrorism while the surveillance and secrecy of the old customs bans have given way to the more sophisticated interventions of the internet police.